Sheffield

To mark 50 Years of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield the following lecture has been organised by the School of Languages and Cultures, The Prokhorov Centre and the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield.

Caryl Emerson

On Mikhail Bakhtin and Human Studies
(with continual reference to Moscow and Sheffield)

Professor Emerson’s lecture will address some of the following questions:

• What human studies (and in particular the study of literary culture and value) can hope to do;
• How the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can help us to do it;
• How scholars at Sheffield pursue a “philosophy of the human” through a Russian and Slavonic lens.

Every vital field that is perceived as failing to provide basic services or commercially viable goods is destined to be in a permanent “value crisis.” But repeating the mantra of a “crisis of the humanities” is a sorry way to approach the challenges of one’s job. The task, rather, is to argue for the absolute necessity of certain threatened virtues: serious study of world languages, human dignity as a cognitive value, organic as opposed to mechanical systems, and the empirical benefits of patience and real (deep) time.

About our speaker:

Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She has written on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in a number of prominent publications including her seminal bookMikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (with Gary Saul Morson, 1990) and The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997) and translated texts such as Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984) and the collection The Dialogic Imagination (with Michael Holquist, 1981). She has also written widely on nineteenth-century Russian literature and opera, resulting in such works as The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (2008) and All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away (Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition) (2011).

4pm, Friday 28 October 2016
Followed by wine reception
Humanities Research Institute
Gell St. Sheffield